The United Nations World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has raised an alarm over the state of global climate, warning that a very strong El Niño event will unleash extreme amounts of heat and extreme weather well into 2027.
The latest WMO State of the Climate Update 2026 shows that the last 12 years have been the warmest on record, with the global average surface temperature between January and September 2026 reaching 1.47 °Celsius above the pre-industrial average.
“El Niño and indeed the state of the global climate in 2026 gives new meaning to the phrase off the charts,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo, warning that the Earth has entered a new age of climate extremes.
“Hundreds of millions of people this year have been exposed to unbearable extreme heat, whilst the catastrophic ice and rock collapse and flash floods in Nepal highlighted the compound risks facing communities in fragile, warming high-mountain terrain,” she added.
The latest forecast from the WMO, produced by multiple partners around the world including South African Weather Services, shows an ensemble of multiple climate models predicting an overwhelming likelihood of rainfall shifts across the world, with southern Africa in particular being projected to be warmer for the November 2026-January 2027 season.
The “off the charts” ocean warming due to the very strong El Niño event can be seen in the record-breaking temperatures being recorded by researchers in the Niño3.4 region of the Pacific Ocean, where the ocean has warmed to 3.4 degrees Celsius above normal, as shown by the Climate Change Institute’s Climate Reanalyzer data platform.
“El Niño doesn’t add new heat to the planet. It releases heat from the ocean, which is the warmest ever measured. There is simply more heat available to release,” Saulo explained.